Monday, May 9, 2011

Lord Love a Duck (1966) is a dark comedy directed by George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay for The Manchurian Candidate (1962). That alone says watch it. The film mocks beach movies, education (high-school Botany has been renamed Plant Skills for Life), family life, home decor (a living-room conversation pit so deep that it echoes), sexual mores, teenaged in-groups, and everything else. As Axelrod says in a promotional trailer, whatever it might be, Lord Love a Duck is against it.

Even Blackwing pencils. Silly high-school principal Weldon Emmett (“e-double-m, e-double-t”) has a cupful on his desk. He does everything with them but write.

[The Concise New Partidge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2008) explains “Lord love-a-duck” as “a mild expression of shock or suprise.” The expression turns up in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “‘Lord love a duck,’ he said. ‘Look at what I’m standing drinks to!’”]

“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”

Don’t look for premiums orcoupons, as the cost ofthe thoughts blended inORANGE CRATE ART pro-hibits the use of them.